People say the guns are junk anyway and not even capable of killing. Others say they're valuable and the city is ripping the people off by offering a meagre $50-food-coupon. Last time we talked about it here, one commenter, Tom, who now has his own blog, pointed out the problem with this program: "The whole idea supports the faulty logic that reducing the overall numbers of guns in the supply chain somehow reduces violence." Well, obviously I don't agree with that.

What I do agree with is what Deputy Mayor pro tem Dwaine R. Carraway said in the video, that it only takes one gun to kill someone. The other day they collected 147 of them. Admittedly, these were not gang members turning in the tools of their trade, these were not professional killers who've decided to go straight after hearing the Deputy Mayor's exhortations to do so, these were simply people who had guns at home that were in danger of being misused or stolen and thereby contributing to the "flow."

For me, this is a good program. The most fascinating aspect of the whole story is the vehement opposition on the part of the pro-gun guys. I asked before, how does it hurt them? Does the fact that it "supports the faulty logic" explain that? What's your opinion?

24 comments:

Suprise suprise, no actual support for any of your outlandish theories. Of course, I suspect this was intentional.

"What I do agree with is what Deputy Mayor pro tem Dwaine R. Carraway said in the video, that it only takes one gun to kill someone."

And if every one gun killed ANYONE we wouldn't have a population...so obviously many guns aren't killing ANYBODY AT ALL! (certainly not illigally...just about everybody owns a few old war rifles that quite possibly have killed on the battlefield, but of course that's not the issue at hand)

Oh and suprise suprise, not being a loyalist to deceit and ignorance, I come with outside support:http://www.kc3.com/news/buybacks_fail.htmhttp://thecaseforsmallgovernment.blogspot.com/2006/04/gun-buybacks.html

So spending tax payer monies on the destruction of guns that don't work, or on valuble antiques that have simply been tucked away for years will have no impact on crime AND destroys what I consider works of art for no gain at all...except loss of tax monies that could pay for more useful social programs.

So Dallas spent $7350 (maybe less, as coupons are tax deductable, so they may have been sold at a discount) but more importantly Police officers were taken of duties that actually STOP crime, and people like Bob and Thomas will get a higher tax bill out of it!

Nearly 150 firearms were taken off the streets today by Dallas Police in an effort to keep them from falling into the wrong hands.

So the assumption is that all 150 guns were legally owned but if left on the streets would have been stolen and used by criminals? Isn't that a little far fetched?

Reger is amoung scores of Dallas gun owners who opted to sell their unwanted weapons to police as part of the program.

Guess all those people who have "unwanted" guns aren't smart enough to go to a dealer and have them make an offer, or to a pawn shop, or to a friend, or place an ad, or to give them away (Boys Scouts can always use good .22 for training), or simply destroy them. Nope they needed a program using tax payer money to get rid of them.

What I do agree with is what Deputy Mayor pro tem Dwaine R. Carraway said in the video, that it only takes one gun to kill someone.

So again, I'll ask you to explain your way out of this"

There have been 105 murders in the city in 2008 compared with 140 by this time in 2007, which represents a drop of 25%.

If there are so many unwanted guns in Dallas, why do we have so fewer murders then Chicago which had 508.

We have states around us with lax gun laws, border with Mexico is closer, no handgun ban within the city of Dallas, yet we had fewer murders? Why Mike?

In general, I don't have a problem with the gun buy - can't buy "back" something you never sold to them--programs. I think they are a rip off, a waste of tax payer money and allow people to get rid of guns used in crime and junk guns also. They also take valuable antique guns off the market for pennies but if people want to be gullible, that is their right.

About the statistics proving that it works, I think that may be an impossibility. Even if the violence dropped considerably afterwards, that wouldn't necessarily mean it was due to this program. Likewise, if crime doesn't drop, that doesn't mean it might not have been even worse without the program and the increase was due to other factors. Maybe the quality of the heroin went down like it does in a fluctuating market, who knows, maybe crime went up because of the full moon. The true cause and effect cannot be proven in many cases.

That's why we need to rely on our common sense and our honest attempts at keeping an open mind and not succumbing to pre-conceived opinions and bias.

Bob, Don't you and the other guys see that I could say the same thing to you: "Isn't it about time for you to give up those preconceived ideas?"

A few people mentioned that the cops who spent their day wasting time like this should have been out fighting crime instead. Now, isn't that a foolish argument? What percentage of their time do they actually spend fighting crime? You talk like it's 100% and the time they took to do this really hurt the output of their otherwise diligent crime-fighting.

I can understand your saying it does no good and is only a feel-good political exercise, but that idea that the cops were wasting their time doesn't work for me.

But it brings up one of my questions on the Part I post. Why are the pro-gun people so against this? How does it hurt you?

If the police only spend 15% of their time fighting crime... how much of their time did they NOT Spend fighting crime during the "buyback".

Let's assume 3 cops, 8 hours times only 15%. That is 3.6 hours....216 minutes of crime fighting that DIDN'T take place because they were at a feel good do nothing productive publicity stunt.

It hurts us simply because it conditions people to think they shouldn't have firearms. That "the only ones" that should be trusted with firearms are the law enforcement. Even the name is a propaganda tool designed to condition people to think only the government should have firearms....after all they are buying back, firearms, doesn't that promote the image of the government owning all the firearms.

It hurts us in the pocket book, that money used to purchase the firearms, the pay for the cops to sit at an unproductive event, the crime that took place and they didn't stop, didn't catch the criminals hurts us.

Now can you show any evidence from anywhere that buy back programs reduce crime?

...Among the largest buy-back programs to date was one supervised last September by the Cook County Sheriff's Department, which collected 5,347 guns in three weekends. The Chicago Housing Authority plans another gun buy-back this September...

We can see how effective gun buy back programs have been in Chicago. Record high murder rate and numbers last year 508 murders.

...Still, independent follow-up studies of gun buy-backs in Seattle, Sacramento, St. Louis and Boston found no evidence that the programs reduced gun crime. In Seattle, researchers also checked coroner's records and hospital admissions data for the six months following a buy-back in 1992. They found no evidence of an effect on firearms-related deaths or injuries.

"The continuation of buy-back programs is a triumph of wishful thinking over all the available evidence," said Garen Wintemute, director of the Violence Prevention Research Program at the University of California at Davis...

Surely the University of California isn't a conservative, right wing propaganda piece for the NRA....wouldn't you say it tends to be fairly liberal?

At a U.S. National Institute of Justice lecture delivered just weeks before Clinton's grant announcement, University of Pennsylvania professor Lawrence Sherman, who headed a wide-ranging assessment of crime prevention programs, called gun buy-backs "the program that is best known to be ineffective" in reducing firearms violence.

The numbers of weapons collected - typically no more than a few thousand guns, even in the most successful buy-back - represent a tiny fraction of the nation's arsenal, with an estimated 220 million guns now in civilian hands and another 4.5 million newly manufactured guns added each year.

Guns used in crimes most often are modern, up-to-date, semi-automatic pistols, one weapon of choice being the 9 mm pistol used in the National Zoo shootings. The weapons turned in during buy-backs overwhelmingly are older guns, such as revolvers, which in some cases don't even work. A Harvard study of buy-back programs in Boston in 1993 and 1994 found nearly three-quarters of the guns recovered were made before 1968. In Seattle, one-quarter of the guns collected were inoperable.

Also, the gun owners who turn in their weapons tend to be middle-aged or elderly. Street criminals tend to be adolescents and young adults. In any case, surveys of the people who turn in their weapons find they have additional guns at home they intend to keep: in Sacramento, 59 percent of participants said they did so.

Sometimes, people also use the money they receive from turning in an old gun - one that would command a low price on re-sale - to help finance a higher-quality weapon. In St. Louis, 14 percent of buy-back participants said they planned to purchase a new gun within the next year. Another 13 percent said they might.

Perhaps there are better uses of the money?She said Pittsburgh is considering a program that would offer financial rewards for anyone who turned in another person for illegally carrying a gun in a public place. Such a snitch program may be a more effective use of money than a buy-back because "it's targeting the guns that are the cause of the problem," she said.

"Goodson is correct — gun buyback programs are a waste of money," said Alex Tabarrok, research director for the Independent Institute, a libertarian public policy think tank based in Oakland, Calif.

"Imagine that instead of guns, police, for whatever strange reason, wanted to get shoes off the streets. Would a shoe buyback reduce the number of people with shoes? Of course not, people would sell their old, tired shoes to the police and new shoes would quickly replace sold shoes. Same thing with gun buybacks."

Isom told Goodson it would be difficult to pinpoint how removing several hundred guns — or not doing it — would affect crime. Police Major Al Adkins argued it would simply be good for the community to have them gone.

Notice that bold part of the quote...It would simply be good for the community to have them GONE. Doesn't that sound like people wanting to ban guns...not get them out the hands of criminals? Isn't that what the program supposed to do, get them out the hands of criminals?

Mike W. is a better mind reader than Bob and Weer'd combined when he said I'd say.

I'm sure he'll come back and say, "Well crime in Chicago would have been WORSE had it not been for the gun buyback."

And why wouldn't I say that? Isn't it obvious? Can't you guys be open minded enough to agree that when you remove 5,000 guns from a city that has 500 murders a year, that they would have had at least a few more had those 5000 not been removed. Even if most of the guns removed were old and faulty, don't you think this might have prevented even one murder, thereby making the whole thing worth it.

"Even if most of the guns removed were old and faulty, don't you think this might have prevented even one murder, thereby making the whole thing worth it."

Sure if defensive gun uses didn't exist. But they do, and you know the numbers. So if that prevents one (or 100,000) murders every year, wouldn't allowing Illinois to join the rest of the United States by having conceal carry laws, and allowing the residents of Chicago again to lawfully posses handguns, be worth it?

But you've said it before, Mike, you don't care about death rates, you don't care about youth mortality, you care about GUNS.

Oh and BTW, Chicago has one of the highest violent crime rates in the nation, and some of the most strict gun control (the surrounds areas where you say the criminals are flocking to to GET guns have very low violent crime rates...despite guns being VERY available...and according to your theory *that no evidence exists to support...wow!* high availability of criminals, there is minimal violent crime)

I'd say your first statement makes you look like a total moron. What would you say?

Those 5,000 guns aren't being turned in by people likely to use them for crime. They aren't being turned in by people in areas likely to be hit by burglaries.

Those firearms aren't getting guns out of the homes, their getting some old guns out. 59% said they still had another firearm at home. So if someone broke in, they would still have a firearm to steal.

READ the INFORMATION, STUDY THE ISSUE instead of spouting off "common sense" slogans.

So, the likelihood of even 1 murder being prevented by those firearms being turned in is extremely low.

As Weer'd said, you think that removing 5,000 guns to prevent 1 possible homicide is okay, but you don't allow for the possibility that out of those 5,000 firearms, 1 homicide could have been prevented.

Isn't saving 1 live possible Mike?

When you combine that with the FACTS of who and what is being turned in, you see the programs don't do what they are designed to do.

As an update, there was another blogger from Dallas there. He videoed some of the stuff going on. In his video, the officer in charge admits that there is no ordinance about buying guns in the parking lot.

When you advocate citizen disarmament; that is an accurate summation of your position.

When you advocate more restrictive laws that adversely impact the law abiding, that is an accurate summation of your position.

When you advocate actions that are shown to be ineffective or worse counter-effective, that is an accurate summation of your position.

When you advocate removing the rights of the law abiding citizens like us, that is an accurate summation of your position.

You offer scant evidence for your beliefs and ideas. What you do offer is usually from the Brady Campaign or other anti-gun groups, where we show, with citations, how that evidence is biased.

You are advocating the removal of my rights....don't you think you should have to meet a little higher standard of responsibility?

After all, given all the porn that could be produced by ex-pats living in Italy, I'm not calling for the restrictions on your 1st amendment rights until I have stronger evidence. Or do you want to voluntarily give up those rights, after all, it's for the children?